Secure and digital contract management with Flowers

Flowers is successfully used by over 200 customers and around 800 companies as organizational management software for digital invoice approval.

But Flowers is a solution for all workflows: approvals, orders, budgets, etc. In particular, a “permanent problem point” for many companies can also be safely solved: contract management.

Because, just like invoices, contracts should be managed digitally, online and automatically.

There is a need for many companies, as contracts are used in almost all departments:

• purchasing
• marketing
• bookkeeping
• Legal
• Congress organization
• Facility Management
• ...

Very different types of contracts are affected, for which a digital contract management The following must apply:

• Employment contracts (for employees, freelancers or employees on a fee basis)
• Confidentiality agreements/NDAs
• Sales and purchase contracts
• Rental and lease agreements
• Delivery and leasing contracts
• insurance contracts
• Maintenance and service contracts

And almost every employee — from trainee to managing director — deals with contracts. Only rarely is there an entire department where all the threads of contract management come together.

In addition, the requirements of the parties involved are very different. One must meet deadlines, the other is responsible for the correct wording and someone has to take the whole thing off.

The same challenges for all companies — often rather unpopular

Contract management is rather unpopular in many companies, whether small, medium-sized or large companies. It is considered a very pedantic, dry task, not exciting, yet rather repetitive and yet complicated.

Let's see what the actual requirements are:

• Contracts must in fact be stored, whether physically or digitally. They are sent to the departments by e-mail, by post or are created in-house. However, every company needs a process after all contracts are sorted and stored.
• Certain groups of people need access to the documents. To check, approve or simply to look up certain facts. Ideally, these accesses are possible online and independently for people, depending on their authorization.
• On the other hand, contracts must be stored securely so that not everyone can read them.
• The financial data from contracts must be available to various departments: Controlling must keep an eye on budgets, accounting must keep an eye on payment processes. And, for example, it is also important for a conference department to keep track of the fees charged for an event.
• Should tasks arise from contracts, the relevant employees must be informed.
• Finally, it is also important to know deadlines for canceling contracts and to comply with them.

Different solutions for all companies — often rather unsatisfactory

In order to meet contract management requirements, companies have always developed various solutions, but especially since the advancement of digitalization. So far, however, there is no one who has satisfied everyone.

Before the introduction of computers, the Internet and digitization, everything was supposedly simple: The contracts were only available in paper form and they were stored in physical folders. Unfortunately, the folder was often in the wrong place or someone had sorted the documents incorrectly. Or the entire contracts were withdrawn for security reasons.

Over the last few years, companies have developed, in some cases, very extensively programmed electronic filing structures, which means a lot of personnel costs. Manually managing and maintaining an overview of contracts, terms and deadlines ties up many resources.

Because the technical implementation of individual access rights is not easy to set up, many have chosen the easiest route: Only one department has access — meaning that all other employees depend on it.

As a result, they are often unable to recognize and meet deadlines. Here too, there have probably been as many solutions as there are companies: their own tools for meeting deadlines, Excel lists or complicated appointment management with existing software systems.

Many such solutions have proven to be error-prone. What to very high costs If, for example, a supply contract is automatically extended even if it is no longer optimal for the current situation.

Many companies initially ignored one important point when implementing their individual contract management. The evaluation and comparability of contracts is absolutely necessary for efficient controlling. Without overview and traceability, active risk prevention and legal compliance, i.e. compliance, is impossible.

More about compliance rules

So far, we've only talked about managing existing contracts here. Die Preparation of new contracts is of course also affected:

Setting up new contracts should actually be easy and uncomplicated: You use the appropriate template, exchange names, dates, deadlines and prices - that's it.
However, a lack of central storage locations means that different versions of templates (should they even exist and be stored) are used. Copying individual paragraphs into new documents is not only very time-consuming — it also almost always produces errors.

For personnel reasons and because they are often simply not informed by the existing structures in the companies, the legal departments cannot meaningfully support contract negotiations. This leads to disadvantageous financial statements for the company and to unnecessary risks.

All challenges solved with one software: Use Flowers for your contract management

Flowers is your solution for the scenarios and problems described above — regardless of industry and size of your company. We've rethought contracts. With Flowers, workflows related to your contracts are secure and automated.

Quick to set up and flexible

Flowers can be used flexibly: Your workflows can be implemented unconditionally and without special costs and your employees will no longer want to miss our no-code software. Especially because it is not only available at work, but also on the go via our smartphone app.

Easy import and export of contracts

With Flowers, all options are open to you: import contracts automatically via email or from any scanner or storage location. They export the documents just as easily as needed.

Documents can be found and viewed at any time

Old-school folder structures are a thing of the past: Our innovative matrix storage offers immediate access to contracts, including full text search and automatic linking of important files. This means that all your contracts — supplier and employee contracts, confidentiality agreements, etc. — are stored securely and logically with Flowers.

Authorizations and responsibilities neatly assigned

Gone are complicated, hard-to-understand access structures: Thanks to our numerous authorizations, accesses can be flexibly separated. Tasks from contract components are automatically assigned to the correct departments or people. Deadline management and escalation management are available to you.

Overview of figures and deadlines

With Flowers, you can keep track of your budget: You can assign cost centers, responsibilities and budgets to contracts as you like. The timely review of contract extensions is automated, so you won't miss any more deadlines.

Verified templates for all parties involved

Long and opaque contract cycles are over: With templates and the use of dynamic form fields, which you can determine, you give employees the opportunity to minimize risks for the company and to work securely and save time. With Flowers, legally secure contracts can be created in all departments.

Legally signed online

Leave printouts and paper chaos behind you: With Flowers, you can now sign your contracts legally securely online with a qualified digital signature.

Compliance under control

We offer maximum security: ISO:27001 certified servers from Germany, GoBD & GDPR compliance and audit-proof document management (DMS) are included.

Flowers therefore relies on Auto-Pilot for contract management. The use of our organizational management software enables companies to work in a legally secure and time-saving manner. All existing workflows can be mapped — Flowers is in use in no time at all and contracts are managed digitally, online and automatically.

See for yourself: Make an appointment for a demo today:

Book a demo